The CSE sponsored a session titled “Roundtable on the Role of the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age” at the 2016 Society for Textual Scholarship annual conference, hosted by Carleton University in Ottawa. Participants responded to the CSE’s recent white paper, “Considering the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age,” and represented both members of the committee and the broader editorial community.

Participants discuss the white paper “Considering the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age,” issued by the MLA Committee on Scholarly Editions. Flanders and Siemens, primary authors of the white paper, describe its purposes and principles; textual scholars who work in different historical periods, from the medieval to the modern, respond.

“The idea that scholarly editing can give shape to the admittedly messy aspect of The Digital, or Digital Humanities, or (as I prefer to call it) Digital Scholarship,” writes John Bryant, “is one that is rarely articulated and yet its articulation here should mark an important turn in the now decades-old conversation about the relation of the mere mechanisms of Digital and the higher ideas and standards under attack in traditional Scholarship.”